President Donald Trump chose to continue his feud with the National Football League today.

In an early morning tweet, President Trump took aim at the NFL’s ability to avoid taxes. He wrote:

President - Question - NFL - Tax - Breaks

To answer the president’s question: the NFL is getting “massive tax breaks” because the NFL’s owners have always been good at gaming the system. Political influence doesn’t evaporate overnight and tax subsidies don’t stop when players start taking a knee against police brutality.

But Trump does have a point here. The NFL has been fleecing communities for decades. The way the system is gamed in the NFL’s favor doesn’t lend itself to an easy fix because most of the NFL’s corporate welfare comes from state and local governments. According to ESPN’s Kevin Seifert, the public has gifted nearly $7 billion to the NFL for stadium-building in the past two decades alone.

Starters - Possible–examples

And that’s just for starters. Here are a few–of many possible–examples:

In Nevada, the public will be giving the Las Vegas Raiders $750 million in order to construct a $1.9 billion, 65,000-seat stadium from scratch. Meanwhile, Clark County, Nevada (where Las Vegas is located) will be raising class sizes for public school students and thereby diminishing the value of their education because officials there were faced with an insurmountable budget shortfall of $14 million–about 1.9 percent of what Nevada plans to give away for a new stadium. And what will the public get out of it? The opportunity to see the Raiders play? Not likely. NFL tickets are frequently priced out of most people’s budgets.

Jerry - Jones - Texans - Hundreds - Millions

Jerry Jones has successfully bilked Texans out hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his storied tenure as owner of the Dallas Cowboys. The City of Arlington technically owns AT&T Stadium and floated over $300 million worth of municipal bonds (which will cost close to $600...